Isolationists and xenophobes trade on fake nostalgia
LAST Friday the markets tumbled and the pound crashed, and it became clear to many in Britain that voting to leave the EU was an idiotic move. As the global economic effects of Brexit were being felt acutely in SA I went to see Disney on Ice: Worlds of Enchantment.
Not very highbrow fare for an arts writer, you may say. Shameless escapism from the pressing issues of the day. Brazen commercialism, targeting family finances through child consumers. Mindless spectacle.
On the contrary: as anyone who has watched a feature-length animated film in recent years can tell you, Disney and Pixar cannot be held responsible for the widespread dumbing down that is evident in the age of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Marine le Pen, Geert Wilders, Islamic State, Jacob Zuma and Hlaudi Motsoeneng (listed in no particular order).
These groups and individuals thrive on the infantalisation of adults, encouraging the enfranchised version of a toddler tantrum: pettiness and irrationality, short-sightedness and utter narcissism.
FREE-
market fundamentalists complain about nanny states — they want individuals to have the right to smoke and drink themselves to death, to obtain guns and go on shooting rampages, to trample or be trampled in an unregulated environment.
In fact, it’s the frauds and swindlers passing themselves off as politicians “of the people”, peddling xenophobia and parochialism and nationalism and nostalgia, who are most condescending in their views of the populace. They sell lies and hatred, confident that these will be lapped up as long as they appeal to the lowest common denominators of bigotry and perceived self-interest.
The protagonists in Disney movies are lured by similar sirens, but they learn to stop their ears to such dangerous music. Or — to apply a different Homeric metaphor — they have to figure out how to sail between the Scylla of fear and the Charybdis of egomania, emerging on the other side of their trials not as renegade antiheroes or loner cowboy types, but surrounded by a diverse set of friends and acquaintances who have learned to accommodate one another’s differences: in other words, as good citizens.
My son’s favourite movie is Cars. If you’ve never heard of Radiator Springs, the dilapidated desert town in which big-city race car Lightning McQueen finds love, humility, camaraderie and a sense of responsibility, you’re missing out. I defy anyone not to shed a tear during the montage depicting how Radiator Springs lost its status as a destination along Route 66: bypassed on the interstate highway “just to save 10 minutes of driving”.
For brilliance in matching animation and music, it just edges out the invigoration of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck as the soundtrack while the magnificent flying machines of Planes: Fire and Rescue put out a forest fire.
ON
THE subject of Planes: I recently learned that one of SA’s finest political journalists has a soft spot for the backstory in which Blade Ranger, the helicopter who leads the fire crew, must redeem himself from a past of which he is not very proud. Think of it as an optimistic allegory for public officials. When adults watch the decline of Radiator Springs, it’s not just the exquisitely sad expressions on the faces of loveable cars that make the scene so poignant. It’s the sense that this captures something about the ruthless efficiency of the 21st century, and about what we lose in a hyperconnected world. This is the appeal of the “good old days” that European and American racists and isolationists exploit — although, of course, the good old days were never that good (or only for a few).
There is also something in this impulse of backwardness that many of SA’s current so-called leaders seem to tout, wishing for a return to the Big Man politics of autocratic chieftains and spats over patronage. Trump, too, trades on a Big Man image: the invincible, swaggering maverick. But as Lightning McQueen discovers, there is nothing admirable in this big-headed posturing. No man is an island, and in the global era no nation or ethnicity is either. Let the modern world come to Radiator Springs.